#thinking about mari nolastname and her cave antics with coach ben today...season 3 hater turned hostage arc is the most character development we have gotten for her maybe ever? lol
i know that yjtwt / tumblr / tiktok are all pointing out the comment she makes about there being two realities, two timelines in which the bad AND the good memories and experiences coexist, but im fixated specifically her anecdote about spending time with her 4 year old cousin who had brain cancer? and how 12 year old mari was with her when she died.
(i did some digging to see what show she could've been talking about and the one nickelodeon show i could find with puppets AND dragons was a show called 'eureeka's castle' which is also making my brain alarms sound off, but more on that later)
mari is essentially telling coach ben about her lack of reaction to the event? there's no mention of comfort for her being the one to witness the death, no, 12 year old mari had to wait by herself in the waiting room until her parents came and got her. but her highlighting the fact that she finished the episode of tv that she had started makes me think its a purposeful? a nod to morality and the capacity for cruelty / ability to withstand it? like its a quality that all of the girls on the team had within them, even before the crash. for most of the girls on the show, misfortune is second nature and evil is a force that is familiar, or one has been lurking around corners and behind closed doors for so long that they can't even be bothered by its presence.
"i think maybe there are two versions of reality. most of the time, the other one -- the bad one, is just hiding...or waiting. but it's all real"
in mari's story, its almost framed like the death of her cousin was a mild annoyance, an inconvenient pause button between her and finishing her episode of television. cousins die too young and sometimes to shield you from even more trauma, sometimes you become more isolated. memory is subjective. we sometimes compartmentalize our experiences to make them easier to process. when you've been exposed to your fair share of misfortune, you're taking the good with the bad and the bad with the good. there's always one within the other. this idea is present in the trauma of all of the yellowjackets (mari and her cousin, tai and her grandmother, natalie and her dad). maybe they turned out this way because of these circumstances that were out of their control. but maybe they always had this capacity for cruelty and the wilderness simply brought it out in them.